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Top Bloomberg Aide’s Surprising Confession on Gun Control Efforts

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Mark Glaze, who resigned last week as executive director of the Michael Bloomberg-funded Everytown for Gun Safety, admitted that the gun control proposals the organization lobbied for wouldn’t have stopped mass shootings, such as Sandy Hook.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, center, and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, left, announce the arrest of 19 people and seizure of 254 guns as part of gun smuggling between the Carolinas and New York, Monday, Aug. 19, 2013. Authorities say couriers smuggled 254 guns into New York City by stashing weapons in their luggage on discount buses. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

The Wall Street Journal reported that “Mr. Glaze said the movement hasn’t solved one of its signature problems: Many mass shootings wouldn’t have been stopped by tighter regulations proposed by gun-control advocates, even if they might have prevented other gun crimes.”

The newspaper then quotes Glaze.

“Because people perceive a mismatch in the policy solutions that we have to offer and the way some of these mass shootings happened, you know, it is a messaging problem for us, I think,” Glaze said. “Is it a messaging problem when a mass shooting happens and nothing that we have to offer would have stopped that mass shooting? Sure it’s a challenge in this issue.”

The startling assertion by a leading face of the gun control movement comes after President Barack Obama said one of his biggest frustrations was the Senate defeat of a bill to expand background checks for gun buyers. The president blamed members of Congress for being afraid of the National Rifle Association.

For three years, Glaze has been the executive director of Bloomberg’s group – formerly known as Mayors Against Illegal Guns, because it was started when Bloomberg was the mayor of New York. It merged with the organization Moms Demand Action, which emerged after the Sandy Hook shooting in Connecticut. The mayors group was established on the premise that Bloomberg’s billions would be able to compete with the political clout of the NRA.

Glaze also blamed the lack of success in getting the national background check bill through the Senate on the Obama administration’s bungling of the Healthcare.gov website and on the revelations of the National Security Agency’s data gathering.

“There’s an almost perfect overlap, I think, between the people who are the most active and radicalized gun voters and people who just don’t like and trust the government very much,” Glaze said. “When you take on the gun issue, you’re forced to take on by proxy a much bigger issue in this country, which is a deeply ingrained distrust of government that gets worse every time the government can’t get a healthcare website off the ground or can’t get it’s act together to pass a farm bill.”

“The fact that people have learned that the government has taken for itself the right to listen in on our most private conversations has done nothing to inspire faith in government restraint,” he added. “It’s that lack of faith in government restraint that makes it difficult to do things like ask everybody to take a background check.”